


Argentina

by Flyting



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Emotional Baggage, Hand Jobs, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Older Characters, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 14:44:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7226677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Almost twenty years after the fall of the First Order, the man who used to call himself Kylo Ren scratches out a living as a smuggler in the Outer Rim, avoiding retribution for his crimes. </p><p>Meanwhile, the war criminal General Hux, long-since presumed dead by the Galactic Republic, hides on a backwater planet under an assumed name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The man who sold the world

It’s raining when hunger drives him out of his ship; a thin misting rain too light to be heard pattering against the exterior hull. He considers darting back inside to change into something with a hood, but after standing there awkwardly on the low gangway for a couple of minutes while his pants got wet and his upper-half remained dry, sheltered by the sloping curve of the hull, he decides against it. His battered pilot’s jacket will keep most of his clothes dry, and he can’t bring himself to care much if his hair gets wet.

He used to be vain about his hair. It’s starting to go grey at the temples and in the back now. Every time he catches sight of himself in some reflective surface and notices the patches of grey mixed in with the black he wants to hack it all off just out of spite. Every time he resists; reminds himself to do _something_ about it before it all turns. He knows who he’ll see in the mirror when that happens, and he’d rather not pick at that wound. 

His ship had touched down in a clearing not far from the planet’s largest urban center. It isn’t a problem. He has a long stride and he walks quickly, loping easily through the underbrush; it doesn’t take long to arrive at a glorified village that could, if he were feeling generous, loosely be called a city.

The heart of it is a cluster of multistory, official-looking buildings clumped together in the center. Roads twist out in all directions, criss-crossing each other and sprawling outward in what looked from the sky like nothing so much as the twisted legs of a crushed insect. Little shops and houses fill in the perimeter around the city-center; a mismatched collection of squat, ugly-looking buildings that probably dated from the days of the Galactic Empire, and older, more graceful architecture- all spirals and gratuitous arches-  suggesting some long-since-past Golden Era. It is all uniformly crumbling and waterlogged now. The Imperial architecture was not made to withstand the constant meteorological abuse nearly so well as what the planet’s long-dead past inhabitants built.  It gives the entire place a forgotten air. Abandoned. A lone outpost of terrestrial life on a backwater planet that is 96% water. 

By the time he reaches the outskirts of the suburbs, his pants are soaked through from the knees down and his hair is sticking to the back of his neck. He could have landed at the decrepit little spaceport in the city-center, saved himself the walking, but that would mean answering questions. It would mean people and paperwork and official documentation, all things it’s easiest just to avoid.

There is no security. No fence, no clear delineation between city and not-city, just a slow transition from forest to populated areas.  One lone house becomes two, becomes a street, a neighborhood, and then he is no longer alone. He steps out of the road and onto a walkway as a decades-old speeder skims past him, followed not long after by a pair of lumbering crawlers. People hurry past on the sidewalk; a mixture of human and some blue-scaled, gilled species he doesn’t immediately recognize.  
  
None of them pay much attention to a tall, slightly waterlogged man in faded black clothes. He chose this place for a reason; it’s small, but not so small that everyone knows each other. He learned that lesson the hard way, years back. Smaller doesn’t always equal safer. Better to land somewhere where an unfamiliar face won’t stand out.

The rain abates from a drizzle to a light mist; just enough that he does not fully dry off, but he’s no longer getting actively wetter either.

A young woman tugging along two small children passes him, headed the opposite direction. She flashes a polite smile of acknowledgement as he steps to the side so they can get by. He looks away until they pass.  He never liked to be near children. It’s gotten worse as he’s gotten older.

He doesn’t have any particular destination in mind beyond the vague drive to find food, and maybe a few other supplies he can take back to the ship. Maybe he’ll look around and figure out what his options are for finding spare parts. There are repairs he needs to make, things he’s been putting off. Best to do them now.

Most of the people he sees are headed in the same direction, towards a blocked-off side street off the eastern side of the city-center. It looks like some kind of street market. He follows them, hands in his pockets, letting the flow of the crowd direct him. People jostle him, their minds crowding up against his, and it’s been so long since he’s been around this many people- any people at all really- that it’s nearly too much, but he makes no move to stop them.

His scars pull a couple of long stares, but they look away quickly when he stares back.

He finds a vendor selling some kind of sweet-smelling fried dough and orders two pieces. His stomach growls like some newly-awakened beast as she hands them across the counter. 

The vendor is one of the blue-scaled humanoids he passed on the walk here. “There you are, utami,” she says. He isn’t sure what the last word means, but it sounds affectionate. Like a version of ‘love’ or ‘dear’.  
  
She rattles off a price and he hesitates, considering the credits he has left from his last job- fucking mess that it was- and the cost of the parts he’s going to need to get his ship back into some semblance of working order. He darts a glance up and down the street, confirming that no one seems to be looking at him.

It’s always a bit of a risk trying this on an unfamiliar species.

“I already paid you for these,” he says, low, threading command into every word.

She blinks at him for a second, round yellow eyes boggling, before, “Oh of course you did, utami, I’m so sorry.”  
  
“It’s fine,” he mutters, retreating with his prize.

He uses the trick two more times successfully, on human vendors both times, acquiring a bag of soft purple fruit and a plastic cup of some kind of hot tea, and sits on a low rock wall out of the crush of the crowd to eat. The top of the wall is damp from the rain, but so are his pants. 

He sets the fruit on the ground and drinks his tea, letting the warmth seep into his bones and chase away the lingering chill from the rain. It’s dark and faintly spicy; delicious with the sugar-sweetness of the fried dough. He nearly moans. He’s been on ration packs for too long.

Pale yellow sunlight starts to peak through the clouds, and he finds himself relaxing a little.

It must be some kind of holiday or market day. Other people are sitting too- on benches, or the steps of buildings lining the street, enjoying the food and the break in the weather. Buskers play music. Families are out shopping. He watches them with guarded fascination, careful not to be caught staring.

He’d almost forgotten what it was like to be around this many people. So many minds, all buzzing urgently with their own private thoughts. It washes over him in a dull roar; persistent and continuous, but not difficult to tune out if he puts some effort into it. He used to do it all the time when he was younger.

His hair starts to curl up at the back of his neck as the sun dries it.

A man at the stall directly across from him is shopping for a present for his daughter. He is examining some trinket and picturing how her face will light up when she sees it. A young couple leaning against the wall a little way down from him are arguing about buying curtains, but neither of them are really angry. It’s nice. Pleasant. He finds himself glad he chose to leave the ship today.

He sucks the last of the sugar off his fingers when he finishes the fried dough, balling up the paper wrapping and setting it on the wall next to his tea, and starts in on the first of the fruit. The skin is tough, but the inside is soft and sticky; almost tart. He lets his mind drift while he eats, listening in on snippets of conversation.

When he hears it, it takes a moment to realize that the words were in his head and not spoken aloud. Two words. A name he hasn’t used in nearly twenty years.

_Kylo Ren._

Hearing it again is like ice-water down his back. There is a flare of recognition attached to the name; surprise coupled with a burnished familiarity. His heart pounds. Someone- he’d been _recognized_ \- how?

Luckily, his body remembers what to do with this sudden rush of adrenaline, even if his mind is in a panic. His muscles tense and then relax as he goes predator-still. His eyes flick back and forth quickly, scanning the crowd for anyone who is staring or running away, or else trying very hard not to do either, but there are so many faces and so much movement. He reaches out with his mind, trying to latch onto that flare of recognition, but it slips away from him in the unending crush of _do I want this one or the blue one that’s too much where is he I should get two-_

He shakes his head a little, like a dog, to jar the rush of other people’s thoughts out of his mind. Pulse thudding dully in his veins, he stands. He is too big- too distinct, with the damn scar on his face- to easily disappear into a crowd, but he moves quickly. Eyes down, slipping through clusters of people and cutting blindly down side streets. No one follows him. He reaches out through the Force for any signs of pursuit, for that flare of _recognition_ again, but there’s nothing. Not even a whisper.

He jumps a low fence between alleyways, ignoring the way his knees protest the impact, and finds himself on an empty street, surrounded by drab grey buildings.

It’s a risk- if he’s being followed, he’s leading them straight back to his ship. But if he were being followed, he would sense it. There would be _something_. He doubles back twice anyway, just to be on the safe side, before heading back the way he came from.

The sky opens up again when he is on the outskirts of town, drenching him anew. He jogs the rest of the way back to his ship, breaking into a full run as he gets closer, and is unashamedly relieved to find her untouched. Whoever it was who recognized him didn’t trace him back to this unauthorized landing. The sharpness of his own relief surprises him.

Whoever recognized him.

Had someone identified him on sight or, far more likely, had someone seen him mind-trick one of the vendors, added it to his scar and his build, and come to the right conclusion? The New Galactic Republic still had a warrant on him, he knew. They issued descriptions of their most wanted criminals to every planetary law-enforcement agency under their domain.

He is almost flattered that, after nearly twenty years, _Kylo Ren_ is still at the top of that list.

That was why he stuck to Outer Rim planets and territories, when necessity required him to venture off-ship. It was easier to disappear out here. He had thought this little scrap of rock was far enough outside their purview that a few days wouldn’t matter, but apparently not because he had been _recognized_.  
  
And on top of that, he realizes belatedly, he'd forgotten his food.

Cursing, he drives his fist into the wall just outside his quarters, hard enough to leave a shallow dent in the metal.  He should leave. Forget the repairs. Go somewhere else. As long as he didn’t use the hyperdrive they should be fine. He should never have come here- should never have left the ship. Should never have let himself be seen. _Stupid-_

The taste of his own recrimination is familiar on his tongue. Too familiar to be anything more than an irritation at this point. It sinks into his bones with a kind of dull acceptance. Another mistake. Another failure. As if one more is going to make any difference at this point.

He leans his damp forehead against the durasteel wall and strokes his palm apologetically over the indent he’s left.

Something butts against his leg and there’s a questioning whistle from somewhere in the vicinity of his knees.

“Not now, BT,” he mutters, his nose crushed up against the wall.

The senile old droid chirrups and runs into him again. He’d salvaged BT-7X from a junk pile on a scrappy little Outer Rim mining world a few years ago. The trader thought it was some kind of astromech- a modified R2 unit maybe. If he knew what he had was a priceless relic of the Old Empire, one of probably fewer than a dozen still functioning, he surely wouldn’t have parted with BT for so little.

And if he'd known the man he was selling it to was _Kylo Ren_ he wouldn't have parted with it at all.

That wasn't really true, of course. He wasn't Kylo Ren anymore.

He wasn't anybody anymore.  
  
But he couldn't just leave BT-7X there to rust. An elite assassin-droid, built to torture and kill its master’s enemies. Abandoned by its creators when their empire collapsed into dust, and left to rot away in quiet obscurity in the dregs of the universe, slowly losing its mind. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

BT gives another questioning whistle, long and low.

“I think I was seen,” he explains. “Someone in town recognized me. I could sense it.”  
  
Urgent beeping.  
  
“No, no one followed me.” More beeping, and a low klaxon. He sighs. “I don’t know. I doubt it.”  
  
Something sharp jabs him in the leg, just above his boot. Hard enough to draw a spot of blood welling up through the thin cut in his pant leg.

“Do you have to- ow, fine. _Fine.”_

He slams a palm on the panel beside the door to open it. BT wheels around and trundles in ahead of him with a cheerful sound. He follows. The droid was worried, and he couldn’t really blame it. Things wouldn’t end well for either of them if they were captured. Disassembly for BT. Probably execution for him, only after the fun of being dragged through a lengthy show-trial.

In a durasteel box underneath his cot there are two blasters. One of the elite new hand-held repulsor rifles, stolen without remorse from a bounty-hunter who had tried to kill him, and an old F11N model, still stamped with the seal of the First Order. He isn’t sure why he keeps the second one. The trigger is fingerprint-coded; he’s never been able to use it.

Beneath them, tucked into the false bottom of the box where he doesn’t have to look at it, is something far deadlier: a crossguard lightsaber, housing a cracked kyber crystal in its battered molybdenum-copper shell.

He takes the repulsor rifle and slams the lid of the box shut. Kicks it back under the cot.  
  
BT makes an excited noise as he checks the power cells on the blaster, then turns and runs itself straight into the wall.  
  
“No, we're not killing anyone,” he sighs. _Not unless they try to arrest me,_ he adds silently.

He wrings the worst of the water out of his hair and changes into dry clothes while BT rams the wall a few more times, whistling insults and threats at its newfound enemy. Snagging a nearly-full bottle of Corellian whiskey from his nightstand along the way, he rounds the corner into the cockpit and collapses heavily into the pilot’s seat.

With the viewports open, he'll at least be able to see anyone approaching from here. For whatever good that will do.

There was no reason to believe he’d been followed back to the ship. He would have sensed it.

Maybe the local authorities just didn’t put any stock in people who came in raving that the Galactic Republic’s most wanted mass murderer was drinking tea at a street festival?  
  
The far more likely option was that whoever identified him was waiting to confront him themselves. The Galactic Republic weren’t the only ones willing to pay for his head. There were private bounties, he knew. Old enemies. The families of people he’d killed- he could never recall any of their names anymore. Would have paid more attention if he’d known he’d have to spend the rest of his life getting hounded from one end of the galaxy to the other by their grieving relatives, still demanding justice for someone he didn’t even remember killing in the first place.

If that was the case, whoever identified him would soon get a short and thorough lesson in just how foolish it was to think you could try to capture the galaxy’s most wanted mass murderer with nothing but a few of your drunken friends. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d had to teach it. Probably not the last either.

Either way, he could see no harm in laying low for the next few days. Then he could creep back into town, get what he needed for the repairs, and disappear. Just like he had a hundred times before.

He doesn’t bother with a glass for the whiskey, taking a long swig from the bottle.

BT, trundling up behind him, chirrups reproachfully.

“I can still shoot when I’m drunk.” He glares at the droid.

A short beep.  
  
“Can too.”

There was another option; one which he didn’t want to think about.

He recalls the warm familiarity that whoever recognized him had connected with the name Kylo Ren. It didn’t feel like the identification of someone linking his face to an official description. It had felt comfortable. Familiar. Like someone who knew him on sight. Someone who had a face, a voice, a wealth of memories tied to that name.

He takes another drink.

The number of people left in the galaxy who could have recognized his face and who weren’t currently dead was miniscule. The mask had taken care of the first part. The war had taken care of the second.  
  
Snoke was dead and gone to dust decades ago. The rest of the Knights of Ren went with him.

Most of the officers who served the First Order back then had died or been arrested in the ensuing chaos. Captain Phasma was dead, taking four blaster shots rather than face capture. Hux had been lost with the _Finalizer._ He let her self-destruct rather than give up his precious ship, the idiot.

Luke Skywalker was dead. Han Solo- his father- too. That one was his own fault.

There was Rey, of course. And his mother, who he is reasonably sure is still alive somewhere. He thinks he would have felt it if she weren’t, although he makes a point to never go looking for that information, just in case he finds it.

The old Stormtrooper had seen him once. The traitor. What did he call himself? Flynn.

No- Finn?

If either of them had found him, he doubted he’d be sitting here polishing off a bottle of very hard-to-acquire whiskey. The last time he’d seen Rey must have been fifteen years ago. She’d cried. Begged him to come home, for Leia’s sake. Threatened to drag him back by his boots if he didn’t.  
  
He huffs a laugh. The alcohol has dulled the nervous tension still coursing through his body from the city. Now all that’s left is the bitterness.  
  
Rey- he would have known if it was her. He’s sure of it. And anyway, she has better things to do than chase him to some backwater planet. She has children now. He’d seen them on the Holonet. He had saved a picture- the three of them smiling and standing in a garden. 

None of this maudlin reminiscing leads him any closer to figuring out who recognized him, though it does go a long way towards killing any lingering inclinations he might have had towards staying sober.

The assassin-droid trills reproachfully and lashes out at the noise with a vibroknife when, an hour later, the now-empty bottle slips out of his hand and thuds to the floor. BT jabs him spitefully in the leg, but the man who once used to call himself Kylo Ren is already unconscious.


	2. We passed upon the stair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of the first chapter has been changed due to the overall story length getting bumped up a bit.
> 
> This chapter has quite lot of Ren puttering around doing nothing, but there is also some Hux so I hope it isn't too dull.

The clock over the public meeting hall kept a decent enough time, for an ancient thing still partly made of rusted gears and aged brass. It was made to withstand; to endure the constant weathering from the harsh sea air. Salt and rain would erode the soft quartz and complicated microtech every few years, but the mechanical pieces- the core pieces- would remain, just as they had for millennia. There was something comforting about the stability of that; that the secret heart of something could remain unchanged through so much turmoil.

Of course, it was hardly up to the old Imperial standards anymore. When this backwater rock had been a trading outpost for the Galactic Empire, the clock would have been meticulously maintained and regularly synced according to the galactic chronometer on Coruscant, which had been capable of accounting for the various pulls of gravity and calculating the local time down to the ten-thousandth of a second anywhere in the galaxy. But the Empire had died half a century ago, and the clock remained. Now it was tolerable enough to set your day by, so long as your day didn’t require you to calculate anything terribly precise.

Lor-Andras Fask normally rose at the fifth bell. He had his breakfast and his shower by the sixth. Checked the messages on his datapad, which usually contained at least one desperate plea from a student who needed him to resend their assignments from the previous day. Routine. Dull.

The most precise thing he had to calculate anymore was the start of the school day, which was promptly at the seventh bell. For a given value of prompt, anyway. In the past year the public bell had begun to slip. It was now often late; sometimes by more than two minutes, according to his personal chronometer. Someone wasn’t rebooting it properly, causing the corroded motherboard to overheat and time to, quite literally, stand still; seconds dragging out over minutes; minute hanging, immobile, in the air.

When no one bothers to reset the clock to its proper time, these minutes are simply gone; lost forever. Eaten by something as banal as _inefficiency_. It bothers him, this lost time.

The bell peals five times; a low, rolling sound that blends with the omnipresent patter of rain.

He barely even hears the rain anymore.

Fask lays in his narrow bed, with its wash-worn linen sheets, staring at the patterns of shadow the rain casts on the ceiling of his bedroom. They are blurry; indistinct without his glasses.

He hasn’t slept. A part of him has been waiting for… something. A pounding on the door. The sudden hum of a lightsaber in the dark. Nothing came.

The echoes fade away into nothing, and the following silence finds him still in bed. A singular oddity.

Not the only one.

Exhaustion hangs on him, heavy and cloying. A sense of unreality. Like he is trapped in one of those endless, dragging minutes; unable to do anything except wait for the universe to right itself. For time to restart.

 If the idea weren’t ridiculous, he would say that he feels like he’s seen a ghost.

He finally rolls out of bed twenty minutes past the bell, his joints voicing their protest at the movement. His wrists and hands especially ache when it rains, which is most of the year. He has only recently conceded his stubborn vanity and bought a cream for them.

He grabs his glasses off the nightstand and slips them on as he walks, barefoot on the old wooden floor. Holds his eyes closed out of habit at that first disorienting moment as the vestine-crystal lenses focused and refocused themselves, making the turn into the kitchen by rote memory.

His caf is already brewed- the device set to automatic. It has cooled slightly while he laid in bed, but not enough to be unpalatable. He stirs in a bit of the watery local milk, deciding to forgo a proper breakfast today. His stomach is already twisted in a bitter knot. Food will only exacerbate it.

The pale lavender milk gives everything a faintly oily texture. It coats his tongue; strange, but not exactly unpleasant. Another thing he barely notices anymore. He wonders, quite suddenly, when he stopped noticing these things.

Fask is not a man who believes in ghosts. A private joke considering that, in a manner of speaking, he is one. A revenant. The lingering shadow of something that died a long, long time ago. Only still rattling around out of stubbornness and bitter spite.

But neither is he a man given to doubting his own mind. He isn’t that old, not yet. The question that troubles him, that kept him awake late into the night is not _who_ or _how_ , but rather _why._ He knows exactly what he saw. Who he saw. There were lines around his eyes, yes, and a dusting of grey in his hair, but Fask could never mistake that sloping nose; that ugly scar, even if he hadn’t once seen it fresh and bleeding, bright red against pale skin and whiter snow.

 _Why? Why_ would he come here, after all this time?

Fask still dreams sometimes, in stark blacks and whites and smears of vivid red, that he is searching for something he cannot seem to find on a planet that is breaking up underneath his feet.

 

* * *

 

 

The man who was once Kylo Ren spends most of the next day hungover and miserable; his head pounding and the taste of stale vomit on his tongue.

His hangover narrows the world to a laser-focus on his own discomfort; his own misery. It’s a familiar feeling. Whiskey was a much more effective way to forget than meditation.

Meditation is no longer the comfort it once was. There is always that vague, lingering fear of who will be waiting for him there in the darkness behind his eyelids; an unfortunate consequence of having spent a considerable portion of his life hunting down and killing Force users. It isn’t something he likes to think about.

When the planet’s small sun comes up, flooding the ship’s cockpit with sharp, astringent light, he drags himself, cursing, back into his bedroom and dials the overhead lights down to zero percent. He curls up on the cot, knees bent so his feet don’t hang off the end of it- _too short, the bed was too short_ , he always meant to do something about that- and pulls the blanket up over his head. The fabric is threadbare and needs to be washed, but it’s blissfully cool against the side of his face.

BT trails in behind him, beeping.

“Yes, I know you told me.”

Another loud chirrup. The sound sends bright flashes of pain lancing through his skull.  
  
“Enough, BT,” he groans, his voice muffled by the blanket. He curses as the pain in his head finds an answering call in his stomach.

The assassin-droid hovers near the bed, occasionally and with malicious glee letting out a sharp whistle, until he runs out of patience and forces BT out of the room with a wave of his hand. The droid flies backwards with a startled noise, and he seals the door shut behind it.

He regrets the act almost immediately. Trying to use the Force hungover is like missing a step as you go down the stairs; it’s disorienting, full of lurching nausea. He should know better by now.

For the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening, he doesn’t move except to occasionally curl over the side of the bed to vomit into a bucket. It’s a relief, in a way. Almost cathartic; his mind wiped free of every thought except for how awful he feels.

He sleeps in fits and spurts, and doesn’t remember his dreams when he wakes. Another comfort.

No one arrives to kill him while he’s indisposed. No bounty hunters. No flocks of police skimmers ready to kill or capture. He keeps the blaster beside him on the scuffed durasteel nightstand, quick to hand, just in case.

Eventually, when the very thought of moving stops making him want to die, he drags himself out of bed and staggers down the short hallway into the refresher. It’s the middle of the night outside the ship; the planet’s two moons bathing everything in pale blues and whites. His body hasn’t synced to this planet’s day/night cycle yet. He is wide awake.

He uses the ship’s cramped sonic shower, ducking his head under the stream to wash his hair. He rinses off the stale sweat that clings to his skin and brushes his teeth, avoiding his own reflection out of habit.

Before he went into town again he’d need to shave, unless he wanted to attract more attention. The scarred side had always come in patchy and sparse if he let it grow in too much; the nerves there seared and dead. It looked ridiculous. Like one half of his face was permanently scowling.  

He’d stopped shaving when he first went into hiding, thinking it might make him harder to identify. Wanting, with some deep, indefinable ache, to be _different_. To try to be _someone_ different. Kylo Ren had always been clean-shaven. And Ben Solo too, long before him.

He runs a hand over his face, scratching idly at the permanent rough patch of skin at the tail-end of his scar, and decides that it’s fine for now.

“Hey, BT,” he says, giving the droid’s scuffed metal dome an idle pat as he passes by in the hall. The droid chirrups acknowledgement, then goes back to ramming itself angrily into the sealed door to the cargo bay.

“I think it’s winning,” he offers. BT whistles and rams the wall again.

A long-buried fragment of a conversation comes to mind. Someone had told him once, _‘Insanity is making the same mistakes and expecting different results.’_ He wonders if that’s true, and if so, who said it to him. It bothers him, suddenly, that he can't remember.

The state of the pantry is pretty much like he remembered it. There’s nothing to eat. The stockpile of military-issue ration packets he’d been left with after the Mandalore job ran out the day he landed on this planet. He’d picked the pantry clean weeks before that.

Out of a kind of futile hope, he opens the door again, as if this time there’s suddenly going to be some cereal or an old box of crackers that he’d somehow overlooked every other time he’s checked this cabinet.

There’s nothing, of course.

Behind him he can still hear the steady metallic crash of BT hitting the closed door. He sighs.

After a minute he reaches blindly around the corner and hits the panel that controls the cargo bay door. It slides open with a soft noise. The droid gives a sharp, excited whistle as he rolls through the open hatch, disappearing into the darkness beyond.

Like an idiot, he’d bolted back to the ship the other day with his tail between his legs, and completely forgotten the food. The waste of it irritates him. Not that he’d paid for that bag of fruit, but it was the principle of the thing.

At least the water tanks are full; the filters still in good shape. He’d replaced them not too long ago. He cups his palms under the tap in the little corner of the living quarters that functions as a kitchenette, and drinks until the growling in his stomach quiets down.

He’d trained to endure hunger, once upon a time; he’d prided himself on it. Hunger, thirst, pain, fear. Isolation. He isn’t sure if his hunger and his fear have grown stronger as the years have spiraled out, or if he’s just gotten weaker. Neither thought is pleasing.

He sighs, running a hand over his face. This sudden onslaught of nostalgia is going to be the death of him. 

By the time mid-afternoon rolls around outside, he’s picked up after himself, swept out the cargo hold, and done a little spot-welding on the docking couplings and the cargo bay doors, where he’d clipped the wall with a skip loader ages ago. The damage he’d done to the wall outside his quarters the other day is repaired; the dent righting itself at a gesture. It’s mindless busywork. A way to keep his hands occupied.

He does what he can as far as repairs go; flushes the coolant lines and replaces the tower coils. Everything else requires supplies he doesn’t have.

He could try to patch the velocity regulators; see if he can get them working just long enough to take off, make the jump into hyperdrive, and hope the entire ship doesn’t fly apart when he does. But making miraculous on-the-fly repairs is, apparently, a talent that skips a generation. He’s never been any good at it; at holding things together with electrical tape, string, and hope. He’d rather just replace what’s broken; do it properly the first time and be done with it, instead of piling one temporary fix on top of another. He hates the feeling of only ever being one step ahead of disaster.

And that would do nothing for the other problems he still needed to address. The power transistor was on its last legs, and when it went he’d lose the main ignition line. The ship had been down to just one HET thruster for ages now, which was almost certainly what had blown out the velocity regulators.  On top of that, the shields were draining too much power from the engines and he couldn’t figure out why, and the climate control was starting to act its age. A few weeks ago he’d woken up to a light dusting of snow covering the floor of his bedroom when the humidity and temperature controls had gotten crossed.

The Eidolon class light freighter hadn’t been in great shape when he’d acquired it eight or nine years ago. It was a knock-off of the old Imperial Gonzanti cruisers, made with about half the budget, and not well-maintained. But he’d been able to buy it quickly from a guy in a cantina, with a lot of _suggestion_ and a few credits, when his previous ship – a Corellian LM-20002- was detained and searched by Republic officials. The Corellian he had gotten years before; traded for a First Order command shuttle.

Eventually he runs out of distractions. There is an old holochess board in the living area that was left on the ship when he bought it, but BT can never keep its malfunctioning circuits to the thread of one task long enough to finish a game with him. He tries reading- he likes the elaborate farce-comedies of the old Republic, with their ridiculously convoluted scandals and contrived happy endings- but after reading the same sentence five times and still having no idea what it said, he gives up.

BT trills sharply in alarm when the droid notices him standing on the gangway, an empty bag slung across his chest. The rich, layered, _living_ sounds of the forest around him tug at his attention, distracting after days of nothing. He realizes belatedly that the silence in the ship had begun to cling to him, stifling and sticky at the back of his neck; only noticeable in its sudden absence.

“I have to go back into town,” he says, fiddling with a strap on the bag. Procrastinating. “We need parts. I need food.”

_Insanity was making the same mistake and expecting different results._

The droid hovers in the ship behind him. Beeps rapidly.

“I won’t let anyone see me this time.” He starts to descend, his boots heavy on the worn metal.

After a moment, BT reverses and starts to descend the gangway after him.

“No, you’re not coming, BT,” he sighs.

The droid extends a pair of vibroknives, trilling excitedly as it rolls down the ramp. They reverberate, slicing through the air. He takes a quick half-step back as one narrowly misses removing his kneecaps.

“I know. That’s _why_ you’re not coming.” He raises one hand, pointing. “Back inside. Before I make you.”

Briefly, idly, he wonders if this is what parents must feel like with their children.

BT reluctantly withdraws his knives, chirruping in irritation, and trundles back up into the ship

“Yeah, same to you!” He calls after the droid.

He makes good time through the woods. It isn’t raining this time, but the sky is full of heavy black clouds that crack and grumble, threatening a torrential downpour in the very near future. He’s prepared for when it does, in a waterproof hooded jacket and boots that go halfway up his calves.

His aborted plan from the other day is still the best option- walk into town, get food and supplies, look around for any sort of scrapyard or parts store. Two of this planet’s days have passed. If his mysterious observer had tracked him to his ship they would have come for him already. If he’s quick and careful, there’s no reason he can’t make this work.

He’ll leave his hood up; steer clear of the eastern part of the city-center, near where the street market was. Clear of everywhere he went the other day, just to be on the safe side. Make quick forays, in and out, avoiding people, the way he should have done originally. It had been stupid to loiter around like that; the novelty of being around other people distracting him. He’d do better this time.

When he emerges into the populated areas, crossing a low field of sea-grass and stepping for the first time onto a sidewalk, he sharpen; casting out with heightened awareness for any sudden familiarity in the minds around him. There’s nothing. The only people he passes are a trio of the blue-scaled aliens- whose species he still hasn’t bothered to learn- heading the opposite direction along the sidewalk. They are talking between themselves, oblivious to him. He brushes gently against their minds just in case, checking for any flare of _recognition,_ but there’s nothing.

There was a small sort of market he passed on his first walk. He remembers seeing the words ‘Zab’s General Store’ in peeling blue paint on the side of a wooden building, the cheerful round lettering offset a little by the fact that it looked like it had been painted sometime in the previous century. He finds it again easily enough, at the end of a cul-de-sac just off the main road. It’s as good a place as any to resupply.

He waits, tipping his chin down to hide his face beneath his hood, for an ancient speeder to sputter past before crossing. Gravel crunches under his boots at he steps off the sidewalk and up a walkway lined by overgrown weeds and scrub-brush. Overhead, the sky rumbles threateningly.

The door gives a tinny little _bing_ when it slides open.

There’s music playing quietly inside; some kind of pulsing beat that sounds like it’s probably very trendy on the Core Worlds. Not that he would really know. The effect is lessened somewhat by the fact that it’s coming from a staticky, flat-sounding old music player with the volume pushed to the end of its limits.

A skinny human boy behind the counter calls out a vague greeting when he enters, but doesn’t look up from his datapad.

He pushes his hood down, feeling like an idiot walking around this empty, dusty shop with it on. It’s the sort of thing _Kylo Ren_ would have done. He feels a ghost of residual embarrassment at the thought.

Most of what’s on the shelves is prepackaged, which suits him just fine; brands he doesn’t recognize, which doesn’t. He hates when things taste similar but slightly different to what he’s expecting. Still, he’s in no position to be picky.

He fills his bag; with food, mostly, and a few other necessities. Enough to get him through the next few weeks. He doesn’t know how long it will take to get the parts he needs and he would rather be prepared.

As he pays- unwilling to risk getting caught doing another mind trick- the boy’s eyes flit from his eyes to his scar and then back, but there is no hint of recognition in his mind. Just sharp curiosity and- he identifies with vague disgust- tawdry excitement. He thought it was _impressive._

“Is there a scrapyard nearby?” he asks, staring back. “Somewhere I can get parts for a freighter?”

“Uh, yeah,” the boy stammers, “About three streets over- I don’t know if they’ll have what you need, but Corlatt and Dante have a place. It’s probably your best bet. They got me the parts for my speeder-”

“Where is it?” he interrupts.  
  
“Over behind the public hall.”

“The what?”

“Um, the old clock? Just go out this way-“ he points, “and- and turn left. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you,” he mutters, shouldering his bag. He turns to leave.

The bell gives another metallic chime as the door slides open, admitting a tall man in a waterlogged dark coat. He steps aside, angling his face away as subtly as he can while the man slips past him down the narrow aisle. It’s probably unnecessary; the man in the coat isn’t looking at him. Still, the fewer people he leaves with a good description of his face the better. 

“Hey, mister Fask,” the boy behind the counter calls out idly.

The sky has opened up while he was in the store, washing the world outside in a flood of muddy grey. He makes sure his bag is closed and slips the hood up over his head as he steps out the door. As he does, he is aware of a prickling sensation; like invisible eyes crawling up his back. A sudden feeling like dread slides low into his belly.

He fights the urge to turn, reaching out instead with his mind.

There is a split-second where he knows what he is going to find before it happens; a sense that is something like a Force vision and something like instinct.

_Kylo Ren._

It’s the same comfortable familiarity he sensed the other day, only this time doused in heady panic.

The man in the shop has recognized him.


	3. Which came as a surprise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A rather short chapter, but there wasn't a better place to end it. Sorry!

The digital bell over the shop door _bings;_ an artificially cheerful sound, the sort that always seems so depressing in its sheer desperation.

“Hey, mister Fask,” Craft calls out idly as Fask steps around a man in a dark jacket and shakes the water off his coat. He nods his acknowledgement to the boy—Craft Chelso, poor-to-average student, consistently mis-spelled ‘imperial’- but doesn’t bother to respond. Fask only remembers Craft because the boy had fancied himself something of a smartass. It was always the irritating ones who stuck around after matriculation.

The little bottle of pale lavender milk frosts over, the cold sticking to his fingers, when he removes it from the stasis chamber, tucking it under his arm so that he can grab butter and a thick bundle of cress – a local seaweed that resembled a clump of oily green hair, but tasted divine when you fried it up. He’d make some with his dinner tonight- a treat.  
  
He shouldn’t even be in here today, he thinks irritably. He’d bought his groceries for the week yesterday, but somehow he had managed to forget the milk. Embarrassing. It wasn’t the first time, either. Those petty little lapses in memory that had always belonged to _other people_ seemed to happen just a bit more to him each year. Losing his datapad. Forgetting the milk. The slow creep of entropy, over time, into an ordered system.

He sets the milk on the counter with unnecessary force, as if it’s to blame for his oversight.

“Did you _see_ that guy?” Craft asks eagerly, nodding over Fask’s shoulder as he tosses a credit chip on the counter. Craft picks it up. He’s painted his long fingernails and drawn a faint scale pattern over the back of his hands, the way a lot of the human boys did on this planet.  
  
“No.”

The boy’s smirk is tawdry in its excitement. “With that scar?” A blue-nailed hand traces a diagonal line across his face, bisecting his nose. “ _Fppt_ \- I’ll bet he’s a bounty hunter or something. _Vicious.”_ Craft licks his crooked teeth, nodding along with his own fantasy as he undoubtedly pictured himself mid-battle, a blaster in each hand.

There is a moment of slow recognition, like the calm before a plunge, and then Fask’s heart leaps into his throat, pounding, every beat turning his blood to ice, before his rational mind can remind him that it wasn’t- it couldn’t _possibly-_ not _twice-_

Silhouetted against the evening sunset, the man he had passed in the doorway, oblivious, stands on the covered porch, surveying the rain with consternation, his back to Fask. His broad shoulders are hunched. As Fask watches, the man reaches up with both hands to flip up the hood of his dark jacket.

Panic struggles against his ribs, an animal trying to tear itself free, to _run,_ to _escape_. How odd that such a little movement could be so familiar, but for just an instant Fask smells metal and blood and _Kylo Ren._

Ren hesitates on the porch steps, his head tilted gently to the side as though he’s heard something and Fask has a fleeting moment of terror— _fuck_ _that’s right he could read minds or something couldn’t he—_ before Ren shoulders his bag and lopes quickly out into the storm.

Alone in the quiet, dusty little corner shop, Lor-Andras Fask lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. It sounds unnecessarily loud in his ears.

“You okay, mister Fask?” Craft asks, frowning, when Fask has to fist his hands on the countertop to stop them from shaking with the hollowness that comes in the aftermath of adrenaline. He blows out another shaky breath; he isn’t even sure what it is he’s afraid of. Ren was… it had been _years…_

“Yes. Fine,” he responds immediately, unthinking. He pays for his food. Craft sticks everything in a bag, surprisingly managing not to throw the milk on top of the cress. Banal, everyday things that had no right to be as loathsome as they were.

“What did he want? The man with the scar.” Fask asks with that he hopes is merely casual interest, once he trusts his voice to remain firm.

“Um, he said he was looking for parts for a freighter. I gave him directions to Corlatt and Dante’s place.”

Fask nods once, something like relief washing through him. So. Ren was simply passing through, and it was mere awful luck that Fask had nearly run into him twice in a row. Well, yes, that would be his luck, wouldn’t it?

A shred of his old paranoia kicks in. The scrapyard was two streets over from Fask’s drab little condominium, near what the locals half-mockingly called the ‘historic district’ of town. Ren could have fabricated the story about the freighter to find his way there. He could be lying in wait- but no, he was being ridiculous. If Ren knew where Fask lived, why would he bother with directions? Why go to his house at all, when he had Fask helpless in the shop?

Ren wasn’t there for him.

The thought should be a relief. Somehow, it isn’t.

Instead of heading out the front, the way Ren had gone, Fask asks Craft to point him to the back door. Groceries in hand, he ducks down a narrow hallway, skirting a path around the half-empty boxes that litter the floor. The back door creaks open with a heavy metallic groan when he puts his weight to it, and slams shut behind when he steps out onto the empty loading dock in the back of the building. He’s already had two close calls with Kylo Ren in one week- he doesn’t think his heart can handle a third.

An ancient speeder with a livid green paint job is parked up against one wall, alongside a trash bin and the rusted-out shell of a skip loader that looks like it’s been there since the Empire fell. The only sign of life is a cleaning droid pushing away at the trash, its water-proof plasteel carapace glimmering wetly in the rain.

He hesitates under the awning. If he sticks to the backstreets, cutting over one street and up the next, Fask can skirt around the scrapyard and approach his house from behind, never crossing paths with Ren.

He has just enough time to feel a flutter of... something, relief, or perhaps it was disappointment, before a large hand grabs a fistful of his shirt, jerking him back towards the door. And oh, he had forgotten how much he hated, hated, _hated_ the Force.

His back hits the brick wall with enough force to make his teeth clack together, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, jarred by the impact. The taste of copper explodes across his tongue.  
  
“ _Ah_!” the sound is wrenched out of him in a low rush.

“Who are you?” Ren mutters, his voice lower, rougher, than Fask remembers. He has one hand on the wall beside Fask’s head, the other fisted in his shirt, pinning him quite effectively against the crumbling brick. He looms, full of self-importance and dark intimidation, and close enough that Fask can feel his breath, hot and a little sour on his face.

When the question finally sinks in- the sheer absurdity of it, and perhaps the impact with the wall has jarred something important inside of him lose, because his lips curl up to expose his teeth and he cannot help it- he laughs _._  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
“You know who I am,” he begins again, irritation making his voice rough. The man is _laughing_ at him. “Which means you know what a bad idea it is to lie to me.” He twists his fingers harder into the man’s dark shirtfront, hoping to show that he means business, hoping to hide the nervous trembling of his hands.

Fuck _, fuck,_ he doesn’t want to do this- he can’t do this, not now- not sober. He should have run. It wasn’t too late- just run back to the ship like the toothless coward you are. What the hell was he thinking, trying to do this in broad daylight, on an unfamiliar planet, where anyone could stumble on him-

Years of training keep his muscles still even when inside he is near panic and the man is still _laughing,_ with the brittle hysteria of nerves too long on edge.  
  
“I’m not that funny,” he growls, and slams him into the brick again. The laughter dies off with a sharp snap of a sob.

“Tell me who you are.” He is suddenly, intensely angry at the pale, long-limbed man in front of him, whose soft hands and bloodless features scream  _academic,_ _harmless,_ and who had to go and recognize _Kylo Ren_ across twenty years and half a galaxy.  

He’d dropped his groceries, and now a puddle of something pale and pink was spreading slowly across the wet cement, washing away with the rain.  
  
Congratulations, he thinks viciously. Hope whatever you bought was worth it.

He doesn’t acknowledge that he is stalling; he knows he is, same as he knows water is wet and fire is hot and all the other obvious facts of reality. Trying to work himself up to just do what he should have done in the first place and eliminate the threat. It doesn’t matter who he is, just kill him. Snap that pale neck and be done with it-

_Fuck._

He may be a monster, but he is an old monster, and he is _so tired_ of cleaning the blood from his claws.

A frown creases the skin between the man’s pale blue-green eyes. Their color reminds him, fleetingly, of this planet’s oceans, when he’d flown over them. Thin, gold-rimmed glasses sit crooked on his nose, and the man pushes them up idly with one hand. The lenses whirr and click as they bring his face into focus. Aside from those eyes, the man looks like he’s been drained of color. Pale skin, pale hair, and bloodless lips, like something out of a fairy tale.

“Do you really not know me?” he asks, not laughing anymore, with faint traces of some posh, clipped accent.

“Should I?”

They’re close enough in age, he could be some old Resistance soldier, long since retired; he has the look of a military man gone slightly to seed. Stiff shoulders at odds with his rounded chest, soft arms.  
  
Someone who used to work for General Organa, who was there at the end? Worse. Some childhood friend of Ben Solo’s, maybe, although _stars_ he hopes not. Ben’s been dead even longer than Kylo Ren has. Even his bones have turned to dust.

With something like hope, the man says, “We used to work together, Lord Ren.”

He frowns, even as the pit drops out of his stomach. Not the Resistance, then. A First Order officer, who managed to scrape through the Republic’s dragnet. It explained why they were both here on this backwater- it was as far away from Republic control as you could get without venturing into the Unknown Regions. But even that didn’t make sense, none of them ever saw his face, he was sure of it- _even killed those poor Stormtroopers who helped drag you off of Starkiller, eventually, for the crime of having seen-_  
  
Starkiller. _Starkiller_. There was something he wasn’t getting. Something obvious, something right in front of him, but too close to make out the whole shape of it. He knows this man’s voice, he _knows it_ , he just can’t quite remember-  
  
_(Starkiller.)_

With long, pale fingers the man plucks the glasses off his nose, folding them up neatly and sticking them in a breast pocket, before smoothing back his pale blonde hair, pink tongue darting out to wet his lips, suddenly nervous. When he looks at him with those sea-green eyes there is something like a guarded plea in them, something stifled and buried deep, but staring out at him nonetheless; it’s a quiet yearning for _recognition._  
  
And then suddenly he sees it.

“... _Hux_?”  
  
“Hello, Ren.”


	4. I thought you died alone a long, long time ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings this chapter for: contemplation of suicide. See end notes for specifics.

He has no right to feel betrayed by the deceit. General Armitage Hux did not owe Kylo Ren his honesty. Hux didn’t owe him anything. There was no trust, even of the most fragile sort, between them to have been ruined. What had there been? A handful of years sharing command, navigating around each other grudgingly, carefully, like two stars in a binary orbit, each resentfully conceding to the other’s power. A few small favors exchanged, here and there. But they hadn’t been close. The general had barely tolerated Kylo Ren on a good day, a feeling which was returned in spades; there was no reason for Hux to have taken him into his confidence.

Knowing it’s unjustified doesn’t change how he feels. It just makes him feel sullen and immature on top of feeling betrayed. Like a child who’s been lied to all this time. His bedtime stories aren’t true. General Hux is alive.  
  
They are sheltered from the storm by a tin awning that stretches out over part of the loading dock. Rain patters softly against thin metal and heavier stone, runs in thick rivulets down over the edge, trapping them between dirty brick and dripping water. A little bubble of safety where it feels like they are the only two people in the world.

Hux is alive. _Hux is alive._ The words fit together strangely in his head, like they are made of incompatible parts.

In the distance, just audible over the rain, he can hear the choking sound of an old engine as some broken down old speeder stutters past. It is… they shouldn’t linger here. The realization crashes in on him suddenly. That feeling of safety is a lie. The store abuts a tall fence, giving them a measure of privacy, hiding them from the residential sprawl just on the other side, but they are still dangerously exposed. Anyone could wander up on them, the boy from the store could find them. He needed to move. Needed to go, run, escape-  
  
Hux speaks first.

“It’s good to see you,” he says, quiet. Formal. Like they’re just two old friends who happened to run into each other at the store.  
  
He lets out a sharp breath that is closer to a scoff, and waits for something to come to him; words, thoughts, feelings. Nothing comes. After opening and closing his mouth a few times, he realizes that he still has one hand fisted in the front of Hux’s shirt, and releases it, his fingers stiff as he unbends them.  
  
“I thought you were dead.”

“I assumed you were, too.” Hux says softly.

Breathe, just breathe. Focus on breathing, in and out, and not on the fact that this is General Hux in front of him. Living, breathing, alive. The title affixes itself automatically to his name, although realistically Hux is no more a general now than he is a Knight of Ren. He thinks… yes, Hux had chastised Kylo Ren for it once, maybe. _It’s general, thank you, Lord Ren,_ or something like that, and his voice would have been dripping with disdain.  
  
The years have been kinder to Hux than they have to him; he looks healthier, all of his sharp edges and empty hollows softened by age and regular meals. He could be somebody’s father. _Probably is_ , he thinks, the words tinged with bitterness in his mind. Some soft, middle-aged academic, in those delicate glasses and plain but well-made clothes, with his collar buttoned up high on his throat just like that ridiculous, unnecessary dress uniform he used to wear all the time.  
  
“What happened to your hair?” he asks suddenly, his voice rough. The pale blond strands catch the fading light, giving him a ghostly appearance.  
  
“Eumelanin treatments,” Hux doesn’t look at him, reaching into his pocket for his glasses and unfolding them. “It was too distinctive.” The lenses give a soft whir as they focus. He nods, vaguely. It explains why Hux looks like something that has been left lying in the sun for too long, all the color bleached from his already pallid features, leaving only the almost-supernaturally-bright green of his eyes.

In his last memory of Hux, the general is on his hands and knees, blood on his knuckles and in between his bared teeth, incoherent with fury as he slammed his clenched fist over and over against the unyielding black metal floor of the ship. His bright copper-orange hair fell out of its careful slick, into his eyes. Messy, undignified. It was the hair that had always stuck in his mind. He had never seen it loose before- never noticed the way it caught the light, like burnished gold. Like fire. Up until that very last moment, Kylo Ren had always thought of General Hux as a creature of ice; of cold porcelain skin and chilly malice. As bitter and unforgiving as the frozen planet where he had built his precious weapon.  
  
What a shame, to only find out the truth when it was too late- that underneath it all, Hux was made of fire.  
  
“Yes, it was.” It’s probably not necessary to mourn something as simple as hair, something that wasn’t even _his_ to begin with, but he finds room for it anyway. Slots it away between memories and missed chances.  
  
“What are you doing here, Ren?”  
  
The name is a knife between his ribs. “I could ask you the same thing,” he says, struggling to breathe around it.

Hux waves a hand, his mouth in a displeased line, indicating the broken bag of groceries on the duracrete. “I needed milk.”

“You live here?”

“Yes.”  
  
“How long?”

Hux lets out a breath. “Seventeen years or so. What have you-“

“They don’t know who you are,” he interrupts, brutish. He hates the way Hux is looking at him. Seeing him. Seeing _Ren_. Tying that name to him again when he’s spent so long trying to untangle _Kylo Ren_ from… whatever is left over afterwards.  
  
“No, of course not.” Hux pauses, waiting to see if Ren will interrupt again, and when he doesn’t, continues. “I assumed you would have gone back.”

“Gone back?”

“To your family.”  
  
It is more exhaustion than self-control that keeps him from driving his fist into the wall beside general Hux’s face. “I don’t have a family.”

Hux blinks at him, owlish behind those stupid glasses. “I’ve upset you. I’m sorry.”  
  
“It’s fine,” he says, brutish, even though it isn’t, not really. He can already feel the edges of his nerves fraying under the pressure. This is the longest conversation he’s had with another human in- years, probably. He wants to go back to his ship. Wants the quiet and the security and his books. He’s never been good at this- at _talking to people_ and especially not to Hux. Most of their interactions when they were younger had descended to childish hair pulling. His own fault, usually.

He darts a glance around, checking that they are still alone. Looking for a way to escape.  
  
“Listen, Ren, I-“ Hux begins, tentative. “I don’t live far from here. Just over by the public hall. Would you like to-“  
  
“No.” His own breathing is too loud in his ears. “I have to go. I’m just here to fix my ship.”

There is a wealth of barely-suppressed disappointment in Hux’s soft little, “Oh. Of course.”  
  
“I’m… glad you’re still alive though,” he adds, too weak, too late. Awkward. Grabbing his bag from where he’d left it propped up against the filthy brick wall while he was lying in wait for Hux, he slings it over his shoulder, fiddling with the strap, trying not to make this feel like the cowardly retreat that it was.  
  
“You too.”

“Right,” he says. “Call again in another twenty years.” It’s a weak joke and he feels like an ass for making it when the soft corners of Hux’s pale eyes harden a little with hurt.

Turn and walk away. He ducks his head in reflex with the first cold spatter of rain hits the back of his neck. Walk, don’t run. Walk. Walk. Fight the panic building in his limbs.

 “It was good to see you, Ren,” he hears Hux call softly after his retreating back.

 

 

He walks with quick, long-limbed strides, his hood pulled up to protect against the rain and the casual glances of people on the street. If he walks fast enough, maybe he can outpace the memories.

The end of the war had taken an awful toll on General Hux.

Kylo Ren could see it unraveling him, each loss another thread, each failure tugging at his composure, his sanity. It had been a curiosity at the time, like watching a bloody accident unfolding from afar. He’d had other things on his mind. His own missions to pursue, the hunt for Rey and good old Uncle Luke dominating his mind to the point of distraction.

If he’s honest with himself, they were both half-mad at the time. Only neither of them seemed to realize it.

It’s only looking back, now, that he can appreciate the strain Hux was under. The unexpected loss of Starkiller Base had been a blow the Order could not afford. They were scrambling to hold their own against the newly united forces of the Resistance and the New Republic without it. Struggling to follow the orders of a leader who had long-before abandoned them and their interests, who was willing to throw them on their own blades to further his own ends.

The death blow had already been dealt, of course. They simply didn’t know it yet.

_“Ren!” The bellow sends Stormtroopers scattering, abandoning the hanger bay en masse. He doesn’t look back, didn’t slow his stride, forcing the general to run to catch up to him._

_“Where are you going?” Hux demands, cutting in front of him, bullying, pushing himself furiously into space as Kylo Ren tries to shoulder past him. “The assault team dispatches tonight, you can’t leave-“_

_“Can’t?” he echoed, low, warning. “I’m not one of your soldiers, general.”_

_“We have orders. You’re to lead the assault on Kelanos IV. You’re the only one who can do it.”_  
  
_Kelanos IV is a labyrinth. The scrambled emergency senate of the New Republic has retreated into its depths, thirty floors underground, on a windswept planetoid in the middle of an asteroid field. They know the First Order does not have another trump card like Starkiller Base, and they think they will not dare send a force to attack on the ground. They think it would be certain suicide._

 _Without a powerful Force sensitive to lead the attack, it would be._  
  
_Kylo Ren tries to shove past the general, who bars his path with a raised arm, nagging, delaying him when Ren is running out of time, running out of options, running out of patience._  
  
_“You expect me to abandon my mission to babysit your troops-“_  
  
_“I expect you to do your job!” His lips are drawn back, baring his teeth in a snarl, one stand of hair falling out of its careful slick. He looks half-wild. In all the years they’ve worked together, General Hux has never raised his voice to Kylo Ren. “That’s an order, R-“_

_Ren lashes out, lightspeed quick, one hand closing tight around the general’s throat, the other digging into the back of his neck, and then he is lifting Hux onto his toes. “I don’t take orders from you,” he growls, enunciating every word._

_Hux collapses to the floor when he’s released, coughing. “Lead them yourself. Unless you’re afraid of getting blood on your uniform.” Ren sneers as he steps over the prone form. He knows that General Hux has never so much as killed a man himself, let alone lead an assault mission, with the enemy firing on him, the smell of burning flesh in the air, and his boots slipping in the blood of his own men._

_He is halfway up the gangplank to his command shuttle, flipping the ignition sequence with the Force, already preparing his departure, when a blaster-shot pulls wide, almost clipping his shoulder._  
  
_“Not another step,” Hux snarls when he turns back, desperation rolling off of him in waves. It felt like the heaviness in the air before a storm. “I mean it, Ren.” Still kneeling on the floor, he levels the blaster at Ren’s chest. His hands are rock steady but there is a muscle in his cheek that’s twitching. Unhinged._

 _It’s child’s play to yank the blaster out of his grip and send it hurtling across the empty bay into his own hand. Hux lets out a soft startled, “No-“_  
  
_“Have fun on Kelanos IV, general,” he adds to twist the knife, twirling the blaster around in his hand. It had been a gift from Hux's father, he knew. Maybe he'd make the general beg to get it back, next time they met._  
  
_The screaming follows him onto the ship, echoing around in his skull even after the doors have closed between them. “Ren! Get back here! Useless traitor!”_

 _Through the viewport of the shuttle as he begins to take off he sees the general driving his fist over and over into the durasteel floor, blind with rage, until his knuckles are broken and bleeding, leaving long streaks of wet in his red hair as he runs his shaking hands over it to smooth it, to pull himself into some semblance of order as a handful of nervous-looking lieutenants approached at a brisk walk._  
  
In the end, General Hux had lead the attack on Kelanos IV himself.

For a long time they had called it the death blow of the First Order. He had read the reports, and later the history books, agonizing over every mistake, every bad call. Thinking what he would have done _better._ For all that it mattered.

It was a testament to his tenacity- or maybe just his stubborn refusal to die- that the general managed a narrow escaped with his life, and a bare half-dozen of the two hundred Stormtroopers who had taken part in the assault. The Republic had been furious and hot on his heels.  
  
Bare weeks later, the Resistance laid a trap for the _Finalizer,_ pinning his old ship between them and a hidden squadron of New Republic Star Cruisers. Before the Star Destroyer could be boarded, someone- it was never confirmed who- tripped the self-destruct sequence.  
  
General Armitage Hux, who the more sensationalist HoloNews outlets had taken to calling ‘The Starkiller’, was listed as the first casualty.

He knocks the hood of his jacket back with a low growl, wanting to feel the rain on his skin, in his hair; wanting to feel anything other than _hollow_ , even if it is just cold and wet.  
  
He’s safe, at least. Hux won’t tell anyone that he’s seen Kylo. He’d be sure of it, even if he hadn’t felt that needy, clinging desperation pulling at his mind like a fond lover; Hux has even more to lose from trying to turn him over than he does.  
  
Kylo Ren may be the Galactic Republic’s most wanted murderer, but at least he never committed _war crimes._

The news of Hux’s death on the _Finalizer_ had been a tragedy to everyone who wanted to see the Starkiller brought to justice. His trial and execution would have been the crowning glory of the battered-but-trimphant New Galactic Republic.

He had watched all of the trials with diligence, those first few years, scanning the wiry holofootage for familiar faces. They always looked smaller, less impressive, out of their sharp grey uniforms. Some of them sneered, or threatened; some stared the Senate Tribunal down with aloof coldness, like they were beyond judgement; others simply looked shocked.

He wonders which sort Hux would have been. The second, probably. He wouldn’t have repented to the likes of them.

The latter kind had disgusted him- the excuses they made. _I didn’t know. I was just following orders. It wasn’t my fault._ Self-defensive lies from the same men he used to see drinking together in the Officer’s Wardroom, laughing after a pacification campaign.

Back when he skulked and clung to the Unknown Regions, living as a thief, half-expecting to find himself surrounded by a Republic task force every time he set foot off of his ship, Kylo Ren had thought that if he ever found himself in their position, he would die before pleading excuses like that. Kylo knew what he had done, and he wasn’t ashamed of it.

 _Idiot_ , he sighs inwardly.  
  
The sign on the low stone fence surrounding the scrapyard says _Corlatt’s Parts and Scrap Metal_ in Aurebesh and something beneath it in a fluid, curling script that he doesn’t recognize. Whatever language the locals speak, presumably. The towering remains of an AT-AT, lying on its back with its legs curled in the air like a dead insect, loom in the distance. And beside it, sandwiched between a pile of old conservators and the wing of a TIE fighter, its hull crumpled in and gaping on one side, is exactly what he’s looking for. A sputtering shield generator protects the yard from the worst of the rain.

There is another sign on the door in the same elegant, unreadable lettering. Hoping it doesn’t say ‘off-worlders will be shot on sight’, he pushes it open, the rusted metal hinges giving a shrill screech as he does. Like everything else on this planet, the inside of the building is worn, the furniture at least thirty-years out of date. Boots heavy on the stone floor, he passes a chair in an ugly floral pattern and a table with one leg propped up on a stack of curling pamphlets.  
  
“Just a minute!” a terse voice yells from behind a tall counter as he approaches it. There’s no one in sight, but from behind a half-open door there’s a loud clattering and a sound like something falling and taking several other somethings with it. A muffled sound of voices, and he thinks he picks out the words, “-think I know – what I did wrong-“

“Yeah, what can I do for you?” One of the planet’s natives appears from behind the door, scrubbing oil off of his blue-scaled hands with a rag. He's younger than expected, but brisk and professional, with lines of darker blue scales on his face, like stripes.  
  
“That Gonzanti cruiser you’ve got. Is the propulsion system intact?”  
  
“Should be, we haven’t touched it,” he says slowly, considering. “I couldn’t tell you what shape it’s in, though, that thing’s been here for years. What are you looking for?”  
  
“Thrusters, velocity regulators, ignition coils.” He ticks off the list in his mind as he goes. “I need a power transistor too, something that will fit an Eidolon light freighter. 8 or 8.5bV. ” The Gonzanti’s power transistor was too high a voltage. He’d learned that the hard way and nearly done the Republic’s job for them a few years ago.

The boy nods as he goes down the list, blinks his large eyes. “Well, you’re welcome to have a bash at that cruiser. We’ve got the thrusters from a Mon Calamari Whipsoon-L7 in the back too that should fit if those don’t. I don’t know about that power transistor though. Hey, Corlatt-“ he calls back over his shoulder.  
  
There’s another clatter, and a skinny human with stringy dark hair sticks his head around the corner of the doorway, glancing between them. “Yeah?”  
  
“Do you have anything that might fit for an 8 or 8.5 power transistor?”  
  
“Mmm, no? I think everything we’ve got is Imperial. 9bV and up. Those babies had a lot of kick. You know what they say about the Empire.” He leers before ducking back out of the doorway. It was an old joke in this part of the galaxy, especially in places that dealt in electronics. Imperial ware – even their tech was power-hungry. Hilarious.  
  
He fights to keep the pit from dropping out of his stomach. Without the power transistor, everything else was useless. He’d barely make it out of the atmosphere, let alone manage the jump into hyperspace.  
  
“I need that power transistor.”

The alien, who he assumes is Dante, puffs out his cheeks. “Sorry. I can order one in for you, but the shipping will be a bi-“  
  
“Fine. Do it. Today, please,” he adds, as gently as he can manage. He’ll worry about the credits later. He’ll figure something out. He always does.

  
  
The rain hasn’t slacked up. He steps outside, pulls up his hood and, standing on the wet sidewalk outside of the scrapyard, considers the way back to his ship. He should go home. Drop off the food and other supplies in his bag. Get some rest. There’s no reason to linger here anymore. He can come back in a few days and pick up the parts he needs. 

It's an easy enough choice to make. Shouldn't even be a choice, really. What reason could he possibly have to stay?

He returns to his ship. BT is happy to see him home safe, trilling loud enough to drown out the distant sound of rain. In a few days he makes his repairs. When he’s done, they leave without ever looking back.  
  
There’s a job waiting for him on an out-of-the-way planet called D’ryleh. There usually is. D’ryleh is one of the main hubs of a spice smuggling route, and their pilots don’t tend to last long. After that is another job. And another. Months seep slowly into years, bleeding out. The holochess set in his living quarters gathers dust, and he tells himself that it’s better this way. Safer. Easier.   
  
There is a state funeral when Leia Organa dies. He watches it on the HoloNet, drinks until it doesn’t hurt anymore, and then goes to find another job.   
  
His voice rusts from disuse. His hair goes grey. He never does bother to cut it, just avoids his reflection more and more as the years spin out, empty and silent, until he can almost convince himself that the figure he catches glimpses of in shadowy surfaces is someone else entirely. Being haunted is so much better than being alone.  
  
When BT grinds to halt, finally gone beyond his limited skill to repair, he goes to the lockbox underneath his bed, takes the lightsaber- a relic now, he can barely even remember how to hold it, his thumb slipping on the ignition- from beneath the false bottom, presses the flat of the crossguard tight against his sternum, turns his face to the wall…

And gets a second chance.

He closes his eyes, rain slipping down his face like tears. It isn’t a vision from the Force, not quite. He and the Force are not on good enough terms for that. But it’s his future all the same. Silent empty years, punctuated only when the loneliness finally became too much. He swallows over the pressure building tight in his chest.  
  
Barely audible at first over the rain, there’s a low pealing sound. It rolls over the town like thunder, bouncing off of wet grey stone. Echoes chasing each other down the street. A bell, he realizes. Through a gap between two squat old Imperial buildings he can see a clock tower. The numbers glow a dull blue, projected against the dingy grey sky.

He thinks of his ship, with its echoing, empty spaces and dusty holochess board.

Thinks of Hux, with his pale blue eyes and no-longer-red hair, hiding alone on this wet, abandoned rock. Hux, who had been happy to see him.

Ren turns towards the clock tower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning details: Kylo imagines/has a psuedo-force-vision that he will eventually kill himself with his own lightsaber, when the loneliness of his current life gets too much.


	5. Although I Wasn't There

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is so short, but I am tired of making people wait any longer while I struggle with wordcount. Sorry i am trash.

The drizzle has mostly abated by the time Lor-Andras Fask makes it home.

Hands fisted in his jacket, he steps off the sidewalk by rote memory, turning through the third narrow opening in a low, utilitarian stone fence and up the front path. There is nothing to distinguish this mediocre little townhouse from the others clustered up beside it. Drab beige stone, built more for function than form. Round windows like portholes, at odds with the overall industrial angularity of the rest of the building. It was built sometime in the last half of the century. Pre-fab Imperial housing. You could find buildings identical to it scattered like sores over half the galaxy. He doesn’t know if the windows were added later or if they were some half-hearted nod to the native aesthetic.

Nothing about the place suggests that the man who owns it is anything other than a boring, damp little schoolteacher. Certainly no one would look at it and think that the most hated war criminal in the galaxy lives there.

  
Three low steps lead up to a simple, undecorated door. A narrow overhang had been tacked on like an afterthought, to spare the doorway from to worst of the planet’s omnipresent rain. The woman next door has hung a set of cheap wind chimes from hers and they chatter listlessly in counterpoint to the lazy drip of water as he palms open the door lock.

  
The door slides shut silently behind him.

  
Lor-Andras Fask knows silences. The suspicious silence of a room full of children. The hungry, sucking silence of the depths of space, when even sound has been devoured by the void. Silences had personalities.

  
In an empty house, every little sound is magnified by the stillness. The rustle as he hangs his sodden coat by the door is cannon-fire. The soft sound as he dries his glasses on his shirtsleeve is a march.

  
It’s is a tacky, mocking silence, throwing his own solitude back at him.

  
What the seven hells had he been thinking?

  
Running his hands through his thinning hair to shake the worst of the water from it, Fask heads for the kitchen. The sound of his own footsteps taunts him the entire way.

  
He fills the kettle for tea; the motions familiar, comfortable. It was such an outdated thing, a kettle, but some things really were better the old fashioned way. Before he came here, he had never known that tea could be made without the astringent undertone of scorched leaves that always accompanied tea from a food synthesizer.

 

His hands are happy to work without input from the rest of him, heating a pan, picking through the cabinet for dehydrated pasta, salt, spices. There are vegetables in the conservator.

  
Dinner would help.

  
As he reaches in the back of the cupboard for a bottle of oil his hand brushes a dusty glass bottle. He pushes past it, irritably.

  
Cheap whiskey. Ren had reeked of it. The smell was practically coming out of his pores, did he bathe in the stuff?

  
Fask didn’t drink anymore. It was too easy to slip and fall, when he drank. He only kept the bottle in case of company.

  
He was glad Ren had declined that idiotic offer of- what? Company? A chance to reminisce? A drink for old times’ sake? Ridiculous.

A saltshaker clatters angrily on the counter.

It was an unparalleled risk, just the two of them on the same planet together, and he had to go and invite Ren to dinner. Lucky, he was _lucky_ , that Ren had refused, that at least one of them had some sense-

  
A spoon sticks in the drawer, and he jerks the handle to dislodge it. Utensils rattle loudly, shattering the quiet. Irritation is making him clumsy.

  
He didn’t know what had even possessed him to make it in the first place, unless it was that something had simply shattered inside of him at the sound of that name- his name- on Ren’s lips, and whatever it was is still cutting him to ribbons with its shards. He breathes shallowly, hands braced on the countertop, trying not the drag himself against its sharp edges.

  
Ren had seen him.

  
Ren has  _seen_ _him_.

  
Hux hadn’t realized, until that very moment, how much he wanted to be seen.

  
In twenty years, the only times he had only heard his own name were when it was intoned gravely on the odd Holonews broadcast, usually followed by a death toll, or when it was whispered, soft and solemn like a prayer, as he stared into his own eyes in the mirror.

  
It was a good name, once upon a time. His father’s name. And Ren had whispered it, breathless with shock and Hux was lost.

  
He opens the conservator mindlessly, and for the first time remembers that his milk is splattered all over the alley behind the shop. His glasses dig into the bridge of his nose as he lets his head fall against the back of his hand on the conservator door.

  
Well, what had he expected? Kylo Ren had been a bullying, self-absorbed ass twenty years ago. Of course age had only calcified it.

  
So what if it had been decades, if they used to- what, work together?

  
Just because it was only them now, that was no reason to think-

  
Every laurel branch he had ever offered the bastard had been smacked out of his hand. Why should now be any different?

  
When they first met, General Hux had assumed, with something he now looks back on as an uncharacteristic fit of naiveté, that he and Kylo Ren would be natural allies. Even comrades. They were both young, ambitious, exceptional beyond a man in their chosen field. Their goals were the same- the obliteration of the New Republic and restoration of order to the galaxy. It had seemed a foregone conclusions that they would get along.

  
Ren was not a scion of the First Order. He had come aboard with his master, part and parcel of an alliance. Hux had never really trusted Snoke. He was an alien- an outsider. He didn’t hold their customs, wasn’t what Brendol Hux would have called the right sort, but if he was the one who could lead them out of exile, if bending the knee to some miserable old alien was what would bring the Order to their rightful place as rulers of the galaxy then Hux would follow Snoke into a black hole.

  
Hux had never much liked Snoke. But he had wanted to like Kylo Ren.

  
Tale of Ren’s skill, both as a warrior and a Force user, were unavoidable even in the upper ranks of the Order. The Master of the Knights of Ren was sharp and strong and fierce- an unparalleled ally.

  
He remembers being honored when he learned that he was to play host to Snoke’s favored apprentice, and wasn’t that funny? He had even written to his father about it, fit to burst with arrogant pride. _I’m to work personally with Kylo Ren to ensure our success. Snoke will trust no one else with this._

  
Then Ren had stormed in like long-banished royalty, barking orders, treating him like some slack-jawed lackey, demanding indulgence and time and resources for his pointless personal missions while refusing to lift a finger for the Order, _chase this, find that_ , as if Hux had nothing better to do with his time than to clean up Ren’s messes-

  
The kettle is shrieking.

  
He lifts it off the heat to allow the water to cool.

Well it didn’t much matter now, did it? He would never see Kylo Ren again.  
  


* * *

 

He thinks that he’ll have to search to find which house belongs to Hux, but as he wanders up and down the narrow alley behind a line of pre-fab apartments he spies him through a gap in the fencing. The sun has already slunk behind the rusted old clocktower. Another hour and he would have missed him entirely in the falling dark.

General Hux is working in a small box of a back garden, moving potted plants out of the rain. His pale blond hair is damp, sticking to his forehead, and there are droplets of water clinging to his glasses. The ordinary fragility of it is gently endearing.

Everything is green and wet. Hux picks up a container of some stringy ivy and pulls it under the shelter of an overhang. A cup of something steaming is sitting on a spindly little three-legged table, next to a single chair.

Bag slung over his shoulder, he hovers at the back gate, unnoticed. His mouth opens and closes on nothing. Now that he’s here, he has nothing to say. He doesn’t want to do this. But he wants far less to return to his quiet, empty ship, alone with the ghosts and shadows there.

In the end, Hux notices him before he can say anything.

Hux blinks behind his glasses. There is surprise in his pale eyes for a moment before his lips purse.

“Ren.”

  
“Hey.” He is braced for the pain this time; lets the name roll down his shoulders. He hovers in the gate, an unwelcome stray. This was an awful idea, why did he think-

Hux starts to say something without looking at him. Pauses. Says instead, stiffly, “What do you want, Ren?” He takes his time finding a place beneath the overhang for the little green fern in his hands.

“I brought milk.”

“What?” Hux frowns.

“Since- I got you more milk. Since yours… broke,” he holds up the little plasteel carrying bag he had picked up at the general store on his way over here, unable to meet Hux’s eyes.

They both simply stand there for a minute. The air smells fresh and faintly damp after the rain. Like the planet has been washed clean.

“So. Here-“ he adds, when Hux continues to simply stare. “Sorry.” For everything? For enough things?

Not enough, apparently.

He surrenders to the rising urge to bolt like an animal back to its den. Leaves the bag with the milk and his apologies sitting in the wet grass by Hux’s back gate. It was worth a shot. He is inured to the pangs of disappointment by now.

“Ren- wait. Come back.”

For a fleeting second he continues disobeying, but he doesn’t want to, not really.

“Come in out of the rain,” Hux sighs. “I’ve got dinner on.”


End file.
